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1 – 10 of 49Marcus Bowles, Benjamin Brooks, Steven Curnin and Helen Anderson
The value of transverse skills, including human capabilities, has been acknowledged for a significant period of time by major organisations such as UNESCO and the World Economic…
Abstract
Purpose
The value of transverse skills, including human capabilities, has been acknowledged for a significant period of time by major organisations such as UNESCO and the World Economic Forum. This paper reports on the application of microcredentials linked to the Human Capability Framework in a major telecommunications organisation that has a vision to establish a baseline to develop the levels of capability for both individual employees and the entire workforce. In this case study, capability is evidenced through learning and applied performance specified in a microcredential that carries a credit-entry score into higher education qualifications. The value of the microcredentials lies not in recognising learning outcomes; rather, it lies in an individual's ability to validate their full potential, open sustainable employment opportunities and prepare for emergent new roles.
Design/methodology/approach
This commentary offers a case study of how a major Australian telecommunications organisation implemented microcredentials that are aligned to the Human Capability Framework Standards reference model.
Findings
The approach in this case study demonstrates how a company that confidently invests in non-traditional learning approaches that increase the value of human capital can tangibly grow the capacity of the workforce to deliver not only its strategy but also its cultural values.
Originality/value
The multi-award-winning model described in this case study is novel and clearly informs current research and thinking addressing this topic.
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Helén Anderson, Tomas Müllern and Mike Danilovic
The purpose is to identify and explore barriers to overcome for developing collaborative innovation between a global service supplier and two of its industrial customers in Sweden.
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose is to identify and explore barriers to overcome for developing collaborative innovation between a global service supplier and two of its industrial customers in Sweden.
Design/methodology/approach
The research had an action-based research approach in which the researchers were interacting and collaborating with the practitioners in the companies. The empirical part includes primary data from multiple interviews, and two workshops with dialogues with participants from the involved companies. The use of complementary data collection methods gave rich input to understanding the context for collaborative innovation, and to uncovering barriers, to develop solutions for collaborative innovation. The empirical barriers were analysed using theoretically derived barriers from a literature review. The analysis generated four broad themes of barriers which were discussed and led to conclusions and theoretical and practical implications on: the customer's safety culture, the business model, the parties' understanding of innovation and the management of collaborative innovation in supply chains.
Findings
The thematic analysis generated four broad themes: the customer's safety culture, the business model, the parties' understanding of innovation and the management of collaborative innovation. These themes where analysed using theoretically derived barriers from a literature review. The industrial context, the understanding of innovation and its management created barriers.
Originality/value
The unique access to the service supplier and its two independent industrial customers adds a rich contextual framing to the process of identifying and exploring the barriers to collaborative innovation. The conclusion emphasizes the importance of an industrial business context, the business logic in terms of business models and for the understanding and management of collaborative innovation.
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This study aims to explore the values, resilience and innovation of four food businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and their responses to the chaotic environment they find…
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to explore the values, resilience and innovation of four food businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic and their responses to the chaotic environment they find themselves in. It also evaluates whether there is evidence of a thriving food in tourism environment propelling these businesses forward within an innovative regenerative tourism system.
Design/methodology/approach
A descriptive and comparative case study approach is used using a holistic design with four in-depth interviews for each business over 18 months. A thematic analysis of the qualitative data provides answers to the key research questions and informs our understanding of the ecosystems in which food businesses reside.
Findings
The findings indicate that an internal business ecosystem with a strong value base and effective networks across a range of stakeholders enhances resilience. The crisis refocused and stimulated a variety of innovations.
Practical implications
An ethos of collaboration and cooperation for food businesses provides opportunities for a shared future where it is implemented.
Social implications
A values-based food in tourism system that gives back to communities potentially creates an external environment that better supports small food businesses; however, the place of food in tourism and the food story of Aotearoa New Zealand continues to lack clarity.
Originality/value
The exploration of four food businesses in the time of crisis provides new insights into the multidirectional inter-related factors that either drive success or hinder it.
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Liliane Abboud, Helen L. Bruce and Jamie Burton
This paper aims to examine experiences of low customer power in service interactions and the impact of those experiences on customers’ engagement and disengagement towards a firm…
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine experiences of low customer power in service interactions and the impact of those experiences on customers’ engagement and disengagement towards a firm. It subsequently identifies how such experiences may affect customers’ wellbeing.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors conducted visual elicitation interviews with 30 customers of a range of services. Data were analysed thematically using abductive reasoning.
Findings
Low customer power is influenced by several factors perceived by customers as associated with the firm and/or the context of the customer–firm relationship. Results show that low power drives negative customer engagement and may result in behavioural disengagement. Low customer power, negative engagement and disengagement can have negative implications for customers’ eudaimonic (physical and financial) and hedonic wellbeing.
Research limitations/implications
Future studies might explore specific service contexts and power dynamics across service ecosystems and should further analyse the implications of these relationships on firms’ strategic organisational responses.
Practical implications
Firms should monitor customer power and explore means of enhancing the wellbeing of their customers through strategies designed to increase customer power, thus, reducing negative customer engagement and avoiding detrimental impact on customer wellbeing.
Originality/value
This study reframes discussions on low customer power in relation to firms and its impact on firms and customers. It identifies low customer power as a key variable in the study of customer engagement, disengagement and wellbeing.
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Mahnoor Sattar, Pallab Kumar Biswas and Helen Roberts
This paper aims to examine the relationship between board gender diversity and private firm performance.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to examine the relationship between board gender diversity and private firm performance.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors test the association between board gender diversity and private firm performance by estimating pooled multivariate regressions using an unbalanced panel data set of 115,253 firm-year observations.
Findings
The authors find that younger, less busy and local women directors enhance private firm performance. Firms with 40% or more women directors report triple the economic benefits compared to boards with at least 20% women directors. Considering firm size, women directors significantly increase small firm profitability, and the effect is more pronounced for high-risk firms. Greater board gender diversity enhances small firm performance as the monitoring role of women directors benefits the firm even in the presence of busy men directors. Consistent with the agency theory framework, the authors find that women directors improve small firm profitability in the presence of agency costs.
Research limitations/implications
Due to the lack of availability of data about private firms, many factors are not directly observable. The analysis uses accounting-based performance measures that may be subject to managerial discretion. Nevertheless, the authors report highly significant results using cash-based performance measures that substantiate the overall findings.
Practical implications
The results of the present study point to the need for private firms to increase board gender diversity and consider women director busyness, age, nationality and firm size when making board director appointments.
Originality/value
This study adds to the scarce existent literature investigating private firms. The results contribute to the understanding of gender-diverse boards as well as the attributes of women directors that enhance private firm performance.
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In the binary sex-segregated space of professional sports, sex-gender diversity is met with suspicion, derision and exclusion. In the United States, along with widespread…
Abstract
In the binary sex-segregated space of professional sports, sex-gender diversity is met with suspicion, derision and exclusion. In the United States, along with widespread anti-trans policies at various societal levels, legislations and regulations are being pushed to limit or eliminate transgender athletes from competing in all levels of sports. However, little scholarship has considered the implications of the presence of nonbinary athletes, those who identify outside the spectrum of man and woman, beyond the conversation of a ‘third gender’ category in sport. In this chapter, I seek to examine how nonbinary athletes embody disobedience by challenging the binary categorization of sex-gender within professional sports. I explore the racialized embodiment of sex and gender in professional women's sports, specifically WNBA player Layshia Clarendon. I explore how disobedience is employed to incite resistance against the narrow sex-gender categories that are forced upon athletes. Finally, I argue that embodied disobedience provides a key pathway for nonbinary athletes to undermine the regulatory nature of sex-gender categorization in sport. Particularly, nonbinary athletes may seek medical and social forms of gender affirmation, while simultaneously embodying disobedience by continuing to actively participate in professional sports categories in which they may not neatly fit.
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Shoaib Riaz, Damian Morgan and Nell Kimberley
A slew of conventional change models and theories appear in the extant change literature. Despite being theoretically sound, these a priori structured approaches to organizational…
Abstract
Purpose
A slew of conventional change models and theories appear in the extant change literature. Despite being theoretically sound, these a priori structured approaches to organizational change management have questionable application given the rapidly changing business environments. Novel approaches, offering greater flexibility to fast changing external conditions, may offer superior models to organizational change and organizational transformation (OT) in particular. In this paper, the application of a complex adaptive system (CAS) framework, from complexity theory (CT), for managing OT is assessed theoretically.
Design/methodology/approach
A conceptual paper.
Findings
A review of the extant change literature suggests that current approaches and models for organizational change are limited in their ability to reflect OT responses to today's highly dynamic external environments. New models are required to inform and guide organizations. A new model, i.e. CAS framework, is deemed suitable to guide the OT implementation.
Originality/value
This paper critically analyses different approaches to change management, consolidates CAS framework, reviews its applications in the field of management and presents a case for CAS's application for the management of OT.
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Caroline Wolski, Kathryn Freeman Anderson and Simone Rambotti
Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health…
Abstract
Purpose
Since the development of the COVID-19 vaccinations, questions surrounding race have been prominent in the literature on vaccine uptake. Early in the vaccine rollout, public health officials were concerned with the relatively lower rates of uptake among certain racial/ethnic minority groups. We suggest that this may also be patterned by racial/ethnic residential segregation, which previous work has demonstrated to be an important factor for both health and access to health care.
Methodology/Approach
In this study, we examine county-level vaccination rates, racial/ethnic composition, and residential segregation across the U.S. We compile data from several sources, including the American Community Survey (ACS) and Centers for Disease Control (CDC) measured at the county level.
Findings
We find that just looking at the associations between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, both percent Black and percent White are significant and negative, meaning that higher percentages of these groups in a county are associated with lower vaccination rates, whereas the opposite is the case for percent Latino. When we factor in segregation, as measured by the index of dissimilarity, the patterns change somewhat. Dissimilarity itself was not significant in the models across all groups, but when interacted with race/ethnic composition, it moderates the association. For both percent Black and percent White, the interaction with the Black-White dissimilarity index is significant and negative, meaning that it deepens the negative association between composition and the vaccination rate.
Research limitations/implications
The analysis is only limited to county-level measures of racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, so we are unable to see at the individual-level who is getting vaccinated.
Originality/Value of Paper
We find that segregation moderates the association between racial/ethnic composition and vaccination rates, suggesting that local race relations in a county helps contextualize the compositional effects of race/ethnicity.
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Deborah Callaghan and Helen Collins
This paper explores employee experiences of induction in the Big Four accountancy firms to understand how induction influences new recruits' career aspirations.
Abstract
Purpose
This paper explores employee experiences of induction in the Big Four accountancy firms to understand how induction influences new recruits' career aspirations.
Design/methodology/approach
Using Bourdieusian sociology, this article adopts an interpretivist multi-method approach through focus groups and semi-structured interviews with 28 newly appointed accounting professionals. The study defines newly appointed as those who have experienced induction within the last two years of their employment.
Findings
The study's findings challenge the authenticity of induction from a shared employee consensus. It cites contagious spin, regarding career progression opportunities espoused during induction, at odds with the reality of work, ultimately contributing towards unfulfilled employee aspiration. As current strategies suggest that the intersection between employee aspiration and employer provision in the accountancy profession, is too broad, this study argues for more collaborative inductions. In addition, it proposes that accountancy firms should re-evaluate their current strategies and co-construct more authentic inductions that benefit all stakeholders to develop a stronger psychological contract that positively influences employee aspiration.
Research limitations/implications
The paper posits action-learning as a solution to address employee aspiration in induction campaigns in the accountancy profession.
Practical implications
As aspiration is the genesis of motivation and engagement, this study’s findings suggest that the use of an action-learning ethos in induction activities may provide an opportunity to explore the complexities of employee socialisation and provide a voice to new recruits attempting to influence any tensions or disappointment that may arise, as unmet career aspirations emerge.
Originality/value
The paper posits action learning as a solution to address employee aspiration in induction campaigns in the accountancy profession.
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